iTunes FLAC support

Who told you that? A little birdie?

iTunes does not support FLAC. There has been some speculation that a future version of Quicktime might support it; if it does, then iTunes will by extension also support it.

http://home.comcast.net/~teridon73/itunesscripts/

Are there any news yet ? I really miss that feature in iTunes.

Nothing's been announced or even rumored about FLAC support that I've ever seen, and given that Apple has their own lossless codec, I consider it unlikely (though you never can be sure).

Itunes does support FLAC, though not natively. The current build of the Vorbis QT components has the side effect of things working in Itunes and i think it does decode FLAC, though can't import or encode. Granted, I may be wrong, as there seems to be conflicting information on the site. Here is the link
http://www.xiph.org/quicktime/. Granted, there is no support for this from Apple and I don't know if anyone can help you on the forums here. I would suggest if you still want to play FLAC file to use another software.

Message was edited by: vincent404

Another consideration. Even if you get FLAC to work with iTunes, iPods won't play the files.

As per the other replies iTunes even the latest version does not itself support FLAC.

On a Mac it is probably possible to get iTunes to play FLAC files but as you will see, not in iTunes for Windows (which you appear to be using).

For the benefit of everyone here is how to do FLAC in iTunes for Mac.

1. First you need a FLAC codec for QuickTime which is available for both Mac and Windows here http://www.xiph.org/quicktime/download.html

However apparently this only supports FLAC in an Ogg container and not in the more normal FLAC file format. On a Mac someone else has written a FLAC importer for QuickTime

2. FLAC importer for QuickTime detailed here http://barelyfocused.net/blog/2006/10/12/native-flac-in-itunesquicktime/

It maybe that you could port the above to Windows.

However in my opinion, you should switch to using Apple Lossless instead. Remember as FLAC and Apple Lossless are both lossless formats you can convert between them without losing any quality.

Originally, it was thought that FLAC being open source (and lossless of course) was the best option for a lossless format without being locked in to a restrictive format (e.g. WMA lossless, or as originally thought Apple Lossless). However as you can see FLAC locks you out of iTunes (effectively) and iPod (and iPhone, and Apple TV).

Apple Lossless was originally thought to be limited to only Apple products (iTunes, iPod, etc.) but some time ago it was reverse engineered so that it could be used in Mplayer, VLC, Foobar 2000, etc. This represented significant progress but still did not support Windows Media Player or Media Center. However I came up with a solution that combined the BASS audio library, an existing Apple Lossless module for BASS, and a conversion of BASS plus an MP3 module in to a directshow filter (that worked in WMP). I got the programmer (Milenko Mitrovic) of that BASS+MP3 directshow filter to do a BASS+Apple Lossless conversion to a directshow filter using the same approach (the Apple Lossless module is open source) and now it is possible to add Apple Lossless files to Windows Media Player and play them just fine and hence also in Media Center.

See the January 8th 2007 entry on Milenko's website here http://www.dsp-worx.de/

As a result it is now possible to use Apple Lossless with all of the below (and probably others as well)

iTunes (of course)
iPod (of course)
 TV (of course)
iPhone
Windows Media Player (yes really!)
Media Center (yes really!)
Xbox 360 Media Extender (yes really!)
Roku Soundbridge
SlimDevices Squeezebox
Sonos ZonePlayer
Foobar 2000
WinAmp
dbPowerAmp
VLC
MPlayer

Though technically, if Itunes were more open, FLAC could work on it. The problem is that Itunes is NOT an all purpose media player. Its job is to manage content that works with Apple TV, the Ipod, and the Iphone. So, it all depends on your usage on Lossless. Personaly, I'm in favor of pure open standards, but this is not the purpose of this board, so I won't ramble anymore. If you want the ease of use factor, stick with Apple Lossless.

The FLAC data must be in an Ogg container. In most cases this means the user must transcode from FLAC in some other container to the Ogg container.

It's been so long since I played with it that I can't remember how I did it, other than I had the assistance of some programs I downloaded.

The FLAC data must be in an Ogg container. In most cases this means the user must transcode from FLAC in some other container to the Ogg container.

The second item in my previous reply details a solution (for the Mac at least) to using FLAC in a standard FLAC container (which the normal Xiph solution does not itself cover). Here is the link again http://barelyfocused.net/blog/2006/10/12/native-flac-in-itunesquicktime/

However I still maintain that these days Apple Lossless will be a better solution for the majority, even those using Windows Media Player.

As I understand it, Apple can not add native FLAC support because it is an open-source codec which requires that any applications which install it release their code as open source. Since no one wants iTunes to be open-source, there will be no native FLAC support.

Does anyone know if this is true?

No, I don't think that is true. Read this:
http://flac.sourceforge.net/license.html

In summary:
1) The spec is open, so anyone (e.g. Apple) can write their own software based on the spec with no restrictions whatsoever.
2) Xiph has written a reference implementation library (libFLAC) that can that be used in any software under a BSD-style license (almost no restrictions -- basically it must include a copyright notice)
3) There's some other software that iTunes wouldn't need to play FLACs that has a more restrictive "viral" license.